Easy answer!
I'm eating his likeness for lunch as I type this!
Posted on 09/27/2005 9:10:31 AM PDT by Crackingham
Dover Area School District's federal trial began yesterday in Harrisburg with talk ranging from divine intervention and the Boston Red Sox to aliens and bacterial flagellum. After about 10 months of waiting, the court case against the district and its board opened in Middle District Judge John E. Jones III's courtroom with statements from lawyers and several hours of expert testimony from biologist and Brown University professor Kenneth Miller.
On one side of the aisle, several plaintiffs packed themselves in wooden benches behind a row of attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, Pepper Hamilton LLC and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. On the other side of the aisle, nine school board members, only three of whom were on the board when it voted 6-3 to include a statement on intelligent design in biology classes, piled in behind lawyers from the Thomas More Law Center. Assistant superintendent Michael Baksa and superintendent Richard Nilsen shared a bench with Michael Behe, a Lehigh University professor expected to take the stand in defense of intelligent design.
SNIP
Miller, whose resume is several pages long and includes a stint as a professor at Harvard University, was the first witness called for the parents. Miller co-wrote the Prentice Hall textbook "Biology" with professor Joe Levine. The book is used by 35 percent of the high school students in the United States, Miller said. His were some of the thousands of biology books in which school officials in Cobb County, Ga., ordered stickers to be placed, warning that evolution is only a theory, "not a fact." Miller also testified in a lawsuit filed by Cobb County parents, and a judge later ordered that the stickers be removed.
Yesterday, the scientist's testimony was at times dominated by scientific terminology, though he jokingly told ACLU attorney Witold Walczak he would do his best to explain things in the layman's terms he uses with his mother.
Miller said intelligent design supporters think an intelligent designer must have been involved in the creation of life because science can't yet prove how everything evolved. He said the intelligent design idea that birds were created with beaks, feathers and wings and fish were born with fins is a creationist argument.
Intelligent design supporters often cite "irreducible complexity" in their research, he said. "Irreducible complexity" means that a living thing can't be reduced by any part or it won't work at all. So those living things could not have evolved in the way Darwin suggested; they had to be created with all of their existing parts, Miller said.
Intelligent design proponents often cite the bacterial flagellum, a bacterium with a tail that propels it, Miller said. Behe and his colleagues claim bacterial flagellum had to be created with all of its parts because it couldn't function if any of them were taken away, Miller testified. But scientists have proved that the bacterial flagellum can be reduced to a smaller being, a little organism that operates in a manner similar to a syringe, Miller said.
One of the biggest problems with the scientific viability of intelligent design is there is no way to experiment with the presence of a supernatural being because science only deals with the natural world and theories that are testable, Miller said.
Some people might suspect divine intervention last year when the Boston Red Sox came back to win the World Series after losing three games in a row to the New York Yankees in the playoffs. It may have been, but that's not science, he said. And intelligent design proponents haven't named the "intelligent being" behind their supposition, Miller said. They have suggested, among other things, that it could be aliens, he said. He said there is no evidence to prove intelligent design, so its proponents just try to poke holes in the theory of evolution.
"Noam Chomsky is the Bulwer-Lytton of socioploitical barflies."
Oh, well said. Well said!
Sorry! I guess because I find both subjects fascinating I think everyone does.
OK folks, you all just forget that link I didn't post.
Of course he does, which is why he said it.
ok, I'll cut him some slack, in this one area, until such time as it is clearly demonstrated by inter-taxa comparative neurobiology that grammar and syntax (and symbolic representation and association) have vastly pre-human roots - at which point, his philosophic angle shall become highly irrelevant.
Ha Ha Ha!!! It doesn't matter what discovery thinks. It's the judges court.
it is free for use as a tagline, but PLEASE correct the typo in sociopLOitical" ;)
If you keep talking that way, you're going to turn Vive ut Vivas' head in your direction. [grin]
Which one's you?
Ah, it looks photoshopped to me anyway.
eh?
now, considering my terminal case of lackanookie, that might be desirable, but I don't understand what you mean... what of what I said would get her attention? Why - is she a neurobiologist?
hahahah...oh man...
He reminds me of Clinton testifying under oath. The purpose of this kind of writing is not to communicate. He is a tone-deaf musician.
ah.
go to work.
the thread will still be here when you return.
if not, there will be another one soon enough.
I don't believe so, but a clever young lady, to be sure. It's your masterful prose that would be the attraction, I'm sure, along with your considerable wit.
OTOH, I could be horribly mistaken...
Can you explain the ability of both Chimps and Gorillas to learn sign language and communicate with humans?
The difference between the other apes and us is in degree not kind. Those other animals may not have the same ability to form words as us, but they can use other methods of communication quite well.
Pinker is an evolutionist (none more hated among our resident creationists, actually, or at least the minority of them who can read without moving their lips), and is deeply interested in the evolution of the human language facility. He's an ardent admirer of Chomsky's linguistics, despairs over Chomsky's writing ability, and deplores his primitive understanding of biology. I just read 'The Language Instinct'; Pinker actually thinks a language facility is unique to humans; he's highly skeptical ( and very funny) about the chimp language experiments; and proposes it was coopted from a part of the brain used for some other purpose.
Atheist and secularists are using up the remaining credit of a society and culture founded on morality which stems from universal religious principles.Correction: Athiest[s] and secularists are part of a society founded on morality, the validity of which the theists felt they had to rationalize as being the command of some supernatural king.Have fun using it up!
Why do you have such little confidence in the rightness of morality that you have to think of it as being some sort of command given to us by a supernatural person of some kind?
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